Security
May 9, 1945 – May 9, 2026: Russia is Standing Tall Again.
Part 1: the failure of the American containment policy
Eighty-one years after the victory over Nazism, the West is playing the same game again. And losing, with Washington becoming entangled in the Iran-Iraq War.
Eighty-one years ago, the Soviet Union put an end to Nazi barbarity. Twenty-seven million dead. Cities were razed. Generations were swallowed up in the fire and mud of Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Kursk. The Red Army didn’t win because it had better weapons. It won because it fought for something the American general staff never understood: its very existence. You don’t negotiate your existence. You defend it to the last man. Hence the term “Great Patriotic War.”
The West preferred to forget this lesson. It reconstructed its narrative: it was the West that defeated Nazism, that liberated Europe, that upholds universal values. The Normandy landings, which took place in June 1944 when the Wehrmacht was already on its knees under Soviet onslaught, became the defining moment of victory. The USSR – which had absorbed more than 80% of Germany’s fighting power for three years – was relegated to the role of a minor player. “Russia helped us win World War II,” Trump claims. This historical falsehood is not a mistake. It is policy.
A policy that allowed the West, particularly the United States, to conserve its troops and spend its dollars. It let the Soviets die and then claimed victory. In 2022, and again since 2024, it’s doing it all over again – with Ukrainian soldiers. The memory of American hypocrisy is still so fresh.
Ukraine: The most cynical war in recent history
What has been happening in Ukraine since 2022 – and in reality since 2014 – is the continuation, by other means, of a war that began the day the Soviet Union collapsed. Washington has never accepted the existence of a power capable of resisting it. The doctrine is an old one, formulated by Brzezinski as early as 1997: prevent the emergence of a hegemonic Eurasian power. In plain language: destroy Russia, or at least contain it until it is suffocated.
NATO’s eastward expansion – thirty-two members today, compared to sixteen in 1990 – is the methodical implementation of this doctrine. The verbal commitments of 1990, confirmed by declassified memos from the US State Department itself, guaranteed that NATO would not expand an inch eastward in exchange for German reunification. These commitments have been violated nineteen times in thirty years. Each violation has been accompanied by a statement about democratic values and the sovereignty of nations.
In 2014, Washington orchestrated the overthrow of Ukraine’s legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland publicly admitted that the United States had invested five billion dollars in the “democratization” of Ukraine since 1991. In a leaked phone recording, she personally selected the members of Ukraine’s transitional government. This is a rules-based order: rules that Washington writes, modifies, and violates unilaterally, according to its immediate needs.
This is precisely the logic applied to Iran for over four decades. Five billion dollars invested in Ukrainian “democracy.” Nuland herself said so. In diplomatic terms, this is called interference. In plain language, it’s a coup. This is precisely the price of American-style democracy.
Since 2022, Ukraine has been the graveyard of American strategy and the charnel house of Ukrainian youth. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died or been maimed – the true figures are carefully concealed by Kyiv and Washington – defending a front line that hasn’t moved significantly in just over four years. On the contrary, it has been breached, with the Russians advancing deep into Ukrainian territory. Ukraine is not being defended. It is being consumed. It is the fuel for a war whose architects are in Washington, its financiers in Brussels and London, and whose dead are in Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Bakhmut. The Russians are succeeding brilliantly, while the Ukrainian Nazi-Zionists and their NATO sponsors are failing miserably across the board.
Meanwhile, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing are posting record profits. The US Congress is approving $100 billion in military spending with the same speed it withholds for its own hospitals, schools, and opioid-ravaged cities. The Ukrainian crisis is a budget line item. A market opportunity. A demonstration of capability for potential buyers of American weapons.
Rule-based order: a permanent fiction
The expression has become so overused that it’s almost comical – if the reality it describes weren’t so tragic. “Rules-based order” is the magic formula that Washington, NATO, and the EU use to cloak their actions in international legitimacy. But what rules are we talking about exactly?
The rules that allowed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, without a Security Council mandate, based on fabricated evidence? Colin Powell brandishing his vial before the UN – a staged event his own staff described behind the scenes as a disgrace. A million Iraqi deaths later, no one has been brought to justice. In place of the perpetrators, Saddam Hussein was tried, imprisoned, and then executed by hanging. No sanctions. No international commission of inquiry. The “rules-based order” never found its way to The Hague.
The rules that allowed the bombing of Libya in 2011, beyond the UN mandate that authorized a no-fly zone – and which served as cover for regime change? Muammar Gaddafi was lynched in a ditch, his country transformed into a failed state exporting terrorism and slaves. The “rules-based order” was satisfied with this outcome.
The rules that allow Israel to occupy Palestinian territories in violation of 150 Security Council resolutions, to continue building illegal settlements, to conduct military operations documented as war crimes by the UN’s own rapporteurs – with the unwavering support of Washington, the systematic veto in the Security Council, and the continued uninterrupted flow of arms?
And the rules that suddenly make any Russian military action in Ukraine unacceptable – a country that NATO had, in violation of its own commitments, made a strategic outpost on the doorstep of Moscow?
Paradoxically, rules-based order means nothing more than this: “Washington decides the rules, Washington decides who violates them, and Washington decides the punishment. Others comply or are punished.” This is precisely the logic of conditional sovereignty.
In conclusion, May 9, 2026, will not only celebrate the fall of the Third Reich. It will be a jubilee of Russian resistance against a century of interference. A historic slap in the face for those who, since 1945, have tried to undermine Moscow’s sovereignty through proxy conflicts.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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